Henry Pickering Bowditch

Henry Pickering Bowditch (April 4, 1840 – March 13, 1911) was an American soldier, physician, physiologist, and dean of the Harvard Medical School. Following his teacher Carl Ludwig, he promoted the training of medical practitioners in a context of physiological research. His teaching career at Harvard spanned 35 years. He is known for Bowditch effect.

Early life Henry P. Bowditch was born to the Massachusetts Bowditch family, noted for the mathematician Nathaniel Bowditch, his grandfather, and the archaeologist Charles Pickering Bowditch, his brother. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts to Jonathan Ingersoll Bowditch and Lucy Orne Nichols Bowditch. Like his brother, he attended the Dixwell School. In 1861, he graduated from Harvard College, and then entered Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School. His studies there were interrupted by his service in the Union Army during the American Civil War, where he rose to the rank of major in the Fifth Massachusetts Colored Cavalry Regiment.

Bowditch's career at Harvard was parallel to that of William James who instituted his program of experimental psychology in 1875. Bowditch and James represented the New Education espoused by Charles William Eliot, Harvard's President. In 1876 Bowditch was promoted to full professor. At Harvard he rose to the position of dean of the medical school, serving from 1883 to 1893. After 35 years teaching for Harvard, he retired in 1906, and died in Jamaica Plains, Massachusetts in 1911 of Parkinson's disease. His students included Walter Bradford Cannon, Charles Sedgwick Minot and G. Stanley Hall.

Manfred Bowditch, Henry's son, gave a personal description of his father. Bowditch did much experimentation in a cottage at an Adirondack camp at the head of Keene Valley which bore his name. There, with a well-equipped workshop the son witnessed considerable "inventiveness and manual skill" that Henry also applied in the physiology lab.

Bowditch was granted honorary degrees from five universities: Cambridge, Edinburgh, Toronto, Pennsylvania, and Harvard. Since 1956 the American Physiological Society has selected a distinguished physiologist to deliver the "Henry Pickering Bowditch Award Lecture".

Research Henry Pickering Bowditch was known for his physiological work on cardiac contraction and knee jerk. He also developed an interest in anthropometry, and showed that nutrition and environmental factors contribute to physiological development. Bowditch can be seen as a link between the milieu interieur of Claude Bernard, his teacher, and homeostasis as developed by his student Walter Cannon.